Making art in the studio, listening to music or NPR and thinking, all the time thinking. It could be about red versus orange or politics or the world collapsing around us or growing old or (most probably) wondering what to have for dinner.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Spring in the Air

As I stepped out into the yard Monday morning with the Boyz, I stuck my nose in the air just like them to get a whiff of something quite exotic - that indefinable smell that presages spring! Could it really come? It's been hard to imagine with the heavy-duty winter we've had.

Front of our house, picture taken Feb 3rd

It's been pretty demoralizing. We've had storm after storm all winter. When it wasn't snowing, sleeting, or "wintry-mixing", it was so freezing cold that nothing was melting. The coldest temperature we saw one morning on our kitchen thermometer was 18 degrees below. Last weekend, I think it was, we had one morning of 12 below.

Looking toward the garage. The handle protruding at the left is the roof rake.

Then this morning, it was 40 degrees. The temp rose up to 52, I saw on the news. That was bikini weather. By this afternoon, we had lakes appearing in the yard from melting snow. Of course tonight the temp went down and the winds picked up (to 45 mph), so everything refroze. Nevermind, I had that whiff and it stirred my imagination.

The Boyz walking through the "avenues" in the yard that Bonnie has snow-blown for them.

Approximately the same view, taken last May

When it's been like this for so long, it's really hard to imagine that it will ever change and all that green will return. The old farmers (from the almanac) call snow "poor man's fertilizer," and if that's so, we're gonna have a helluva growing season.

A big THANK YOU to my valentine, Bonnie, for dealing with all the snow this winter! She did it ALL with her trusty snow blower plus lots of shoveling, roof raking, icicle breaking, scraping, salting, and whatever else needed to be done. The "Man of the House" proved she was up to the task of dealing with it all--and doing it cheerfully. A true Wonder Woman!

In the Studio
While Bonnie was working on the snow, I've been spending a lot of time in the studio. Much of the time I was working, but I've also been doing a lot of cleaning up and moving things around to host visitors This weekend it was a pleasure to go in there to work and drag things out that I didn't have to put back. I had to get back to normal after rearranging for the Smith class. The trouble with moving things and stogging them somewhere is that they often don't reappear until years later - the curse of neatness!

I made these two little pieces for the sculpture show at Castle Hill this summer, but they seem less than exciting. I wasn't really happy working at this scale. (They are just 8"x10".) Sometimes the ideas you have don't pan out in the flesh. So I'm starting over and making something different.

Domino-trix, 6"x 14", mixed media with encaustic and dominoes

Here's another small piece that I just had photographed and will use as the inspiration for larger works for Greg Wright's show in the fall on the theme of pollination. The new pieces will include many more dominoes as related to my definition of pollination. There will be 12 artists who work in encaustic in this show at the Brush Gallery in Lowell, Mass. and a lot of related programming.

Of course there are also several shows connected with the encaustic conference that require work on a theme. I'm not so sure that I'm up to it. Sometimes you just have to continue on your path and not get sidetracked. By the way, a big thank you to Joanne M. for prominently posting one of my works on the conference home page!

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What am I reading?

I'm always reading something and now it's another one of Robert Caro's volumes of Lyndon Johnson's biography. "Passage of Power" is the fourth volume in this monumental series and covers the years 1958 to 1964. This period of Johnson's life was full of extremes of power - from the peak as Majority Leader of the Senate, then fading as he failed to actively campaign for the presidential nomination in 1960. Once he joined Kennedy on the 1960 Democratic ticket, his southern connections gave Kennedy the win, but Johnson sank into powerless oblivion and became the butt of jokes by "the Harvards." On Kennedy's death, Johnson ascended to the presidency and experienced another series of extremes of political power.

Caro is a master of biography and is always interesting and informative. I recommend this volume (and series) to anyone who follows politics and wants to know some background on how we got where we are today.